gommo June 30th, 2008
Saturday was the main day of the conference. Sessions go for 1 hour (5 session times in the day) and there were 5 sessions that ran in parallel. This made it hard to decide what I actually wanted to go to and I found it particularly harder than this year with many quality sessions. The CITCON wiki will slowly be updated this week from notes taken in those sessions. It can be found @ http://www.citconf.com/wiki/index.php?title=CITCONAsiaPacific2008Sessions
Some pics are already surfacing too - http://flickr.com/photos/talios/sets/72157605892492402/
The best part about CITCON is just socialising with the talented people that attend. Everyone is dead keen on agile and continuous integration (obviously because they gave up their weekends). Being from Newcastle means I’m not surrounded or have frequent access to this type of talent and I think it’s important to take the things learned from these events and adapt my development processes for the better.
I’ll be helping organise next years event so hopefully we can make it even bigger and better.
gommo June 28th, 2008
Arrived at CITCON on Friday night for the session scoping night. CITCON is run in an Open Spaces format which means there is no agenda, the responsibility of running a good conference is up to the attendees. The only rule is the ‘Rule of Two Feet’. If your not getting value out of a session, standup and go to another one.
There were a few familiar faces from CITCON 2007 in Sydney but by far the majority where new people from Melbourne. CITCON 2008 Melbourne was also the largest CITCON worldwide to date, beating out Sydney for the top honour. This is great news for Australia as its indicating there is a lot of interest for this type of development as well as demonstrating the amount of talent we have here.
After the topics for Saturday were proposed there was a social hour and then about 12 of us headed off for a local pub. It took us so long to find a decent one that didn’t have $30 cover charges that we lost 2 guys along the way 
I woke up a little worse for wear on Sat morning ready for the sessions.
gommo June 26th, 2008
I’m off to Melbourne tomorrow for CITCON, 2008 and hoping to pick up as much valuable information about Continuous Integration and Testing as possible. Last year, my team was still in the early steps of adopting many of these strategies. A year on, and hopefully I have something to bring to the table this year.
It looks like being a full conference so looking forward to meeting lots of new faces.
gommo August 2nd, 2007
What a great move! I love both companies products and now they’re operated under the one roof. Great news and can’t wait to see the benefit in terms of tighter integration. I recommend ALL of their products.
gommo June 4th, 2007
I’m working on some articles that may or may not ever see the light of day. In the mean time here’s a short blog post I found the other day listing the 3 most important things that improve code quality.
Improving Code Quality
gommo May 7th, 2007
People who know me know I have a love affair with Atlassian and their products. Well, they turned 5 recently and posted a video on youtube showing their remarkable achievements over that time
That awesome song on the first part of the video is from The Chemical Romance
gommo March 8th, 2007
Just a small rant about php. Sometimes it can waste a lot of my time simply because not only does it not require variables to be declared but it’s case insensitivity often leads to mistypings becoming hard to track bugs.
In my most recent case I made a modification to an existing document management system. The modification is detailed but the part that caused issues was a little feature that allowed you to control whether or not you could check a document back into the server under a different filename than what was originally checked out. We made the decision early on to not allow this behavior. The actual control for this was a checkbox on a form. In error I simply commented out this code forgetting that the variable used to access this checkbox now would be created further down in the logic below.
$sPrefixedFileName = KTDocumentUtil::getDocumentFilenameWithPrefix($this->oDocument);
if ($sPrefixedFileName != $_FILES['file']['name']) {
if($bForceFilename) {
$this->errorRedirectToMain(....);
} else {
$aOptions['newfilename'] = $sNewFilename;
}
The bForceFilename variable doesn’t exist so it defaults to null and we end up enabling checking in documents of different names to what they were checked out under. Previously I also had issues where variables were named slightly different in terms of case and of course these are just nulls then. You end up scratching your head wondering why variable assignments aren’t working until you realise the variable is $sSomeVariable in one place and $ssomeVariable in another place.
I’m all for dynamic languages in general but I’d like to have the option to force declaring the existence of a variable before use. That would save hours of chasing these little errors around.
Annoying little problems
